Ned Halley stood near the stove, treating his hands to the luxury of unaccustomed warmth. “A fire is cozy, of a March evening,” he murmured absently. That a stranger had built the fire and was now pouring tea for him seemed not at all odd to the old priest.
“Here, Father,” said Stephen. “Sit down and drink this tea. It’ll take away the chill.” He helped the old priest out of his sodden coat, then sliced the remnants of the rye loaf. Ned Halley sat down at the table, murmured grace before food, and lifted the steaming cup to his lips. Because the bread was too hard to chew, he soaked small pieces of it in his tea before putting them into his mouth.
“Would you like some fish, Father?” Stephen almost said the fish.
“No, thank you; this is quite enough. I eat my heavy meal in the middle of the day. But, if you would like the fish, Father—”
“No, no.” Stephen stoked the fire while Ned Halley finished his supper and crossed himself in thanksgiving. They sat in silence. Steve couldn’t decide whether the pastor was too courteous to ask, “Who are you?” or whether he knew already, and was past caring. Either his spiritual detachment was great or his fatigue was heavy. He dozed by the fire.
When Ned Halley awoke, Stephen handed him the envelope containing his credentials and the letter from Pastor Monaghan. The old priest glanced briefly at both, then gave proof that his faculties were alert.
“My old friend William Monaghan says in his note that you are an extremely able curate. Flattery is not a weakness with William. Therefore I can believe you are everything he says.” Having completed this perfect syllogism, Ned Halley rose. “Welcome, Father Fermoyle, to the parish of St. Peter’s in Stonebury.” He walked unsteadily toward the kitchen door. “I insist that you eat the fish, Father. You must be hungry after your long ride.”
Rolling sleeplessly on a stiff straw mattress, Stephen could barely wait for daybreak. So much to be explored in the parish. So much to be understood about his pastor. Stephen had half expected to find in Father Halley one of those unfortunate “whisky priests,” a man whose secret tippling had barred him from advancement. But this frail priest was no tippler; the acid of abstinence had gouged away everything but the luminous core of his spirit. He didn’t even eat! Stephen twisted on the coarse mattress, ravenously hungry, his thoughts circling around the strange phenomenon of Ned Halley. How had he incurred the Cardinal’s wrath? And what was the cause of his strange detachment from reality, which he carried to the point of neglecting health and appearance? Some defect in intelligence? No. His precise appraisal of Monaghan’s letter ruled that out. From what character malady was the man suffering, and what in life would be its cure? Stephen turned with his own questions, famished for food, awaiting the first gray announcement of morning.
At six he arose, doused himself with cold water, and hastened toward the church. His plan was to offer Mass, then slip into town for groceries, and make breakfast for the pastor and himself. But when he opened the sacristy door, he saw Ned Halley already at the vesting bench, robing for Mass. Wordlessly Stephen took up the humbler office of acolyte, led the way to the altar.
He was shocked, entering the body of the church, by its pitiful state of disrepair. Walls and ceiling were cracked, splotched with rain streaks and patches of mold. Many of the pews were broken; the stations of the cross, poor wooden things, hung askew. Two posts were missing from the altar rail, and the sanctuary carpet was in tatters. The altar itself needed a new coat of paint and urgent replacement of worn linen. The sacred vessels were tarnished, and the leather covers of the Mass book were curling with age.
Yet, assisting Ned Halley at this shabby altar was one of the richest experiences that Stephen ever had. The frayed vestments and tarnished chalice were miraculously transformed when the old priest lifted his thin arms at the Introibo. Flesh of earthly defeat became radiant as Ned Halley humbly united himself with the Victim in the mystical reenactment of Calvary.
Afterwards, he acknowledged Stephen’s assistance with gentle detachment. “Thank you, Father,” he said simply. “Now I will assist you.”
Held in the magnetic field of Ned Halley’s saintliness, Stephen walked slowly back to the house with the old man. A protective instinct filled him with a yearning to lift the physical burden of parish duties from his frail shoulders; he hoped that the pastor would give him instructions, assignments to duty. But at that hour Ned Halley was eager for only one thing—the meditation which is the special joy of those who have just celebrated Mass. He entered his study, knelt at the worn prie-dieu, and covered his face with blue-veined hands.
Ravenous hunger was consuming Stephen. The fish! He must have his half of it now. He opened the pantry door, and there on a little shelf he saw not one, but two smoked perch. Two chunks of a habitant rye loaf lay fceside them. And on a piece of brown paper was a little mound of coarse-ground coffee.
The loaves and fishes. Coffee, too. Miracle du jour!
Stephen made coffee, set the table for two, and waited for Father Halley to join him at breakfast. The pastor, long at prayer, finally emerged from his study and sat down at the kitchen table like a toothless Elijah accepting heaven-descended food as a matter of course. Stephen waited till the rector’s coffee-soaked crust had disappeared, then ventured to ask:
“Would you mind, Father, if I took a walk around the parish?”
“Not at all. Feel free to come and go as you wish.” Ned Halley paused for a moment. “I’m afraid, though, that you may have some difficulty locating our parishioners.”
“You mean they’re scattered all over the countryside?”
“No,” said Ned Halley, “they’re all in one place. But that place is rather hard to find.”
“You make it sound mystifying.”
“It is a little puzzling at first,” agreed the pastor. “Officially the parish of St. Peter’s coincides with the town borders of Stonebury. But actually you’ll find most of our people clustered in a rocky hollow called L’Enclume.”
“An odd name.”
“It’s French for ‘anvil.’” The rector, who could talk as well as another when the vein was flowing, continued: “Twenty years ago, in the great days of the Merlin quarries, a forge and a tavern prospered there. Oxcarts drawing heavy blocks of granite to the railway siding in Stonebury would stop at L’Enclume for repairs and—ah—refreshment. Fire has long since razed the tavern, and no axles are straightened now at the forge. But the French Canadians who worked the quarries—they’re all Catholics, of course—still cling to its exhausted flank.”
“What do they do for a living?”
“Not a great deal. The chief industries hereabouts are blueberry-picking in summer and ice-cutting in winter. Some of the men chop wood.”
Steve began to understand why St. Peter’s was in such a state of disrepair. “How do I get to L’Enclume, Father?”
“I’ll show you.” Ned Halley led his new curate to the back door of the parish house and pointed across a deep, tree-filled valley. “L’Enclume lies on the other side of this gorge,” he said. “I myself never take the short cut through the valley; it is a swampy treacherous bog. You will do better if you take the macadam road that passes the front of our house, and follow it for three quarters of a mile. Turn left down a sloping dirt road, and stay on that till you strike a burned forge. Then, by the complexion and language of the people, you’ll know you’re in L’Enclume.”
“I’ll find it,” said Stephen confidently.
“I have no doubt that you will.” Ned Halley fingered his lower lip thoughtfully. “My only suggestion—and I offer it merely as a suggestion—is that you do not enter the houses of these people unless they invite you to do so. Their poverty is extreme, and when a priest comes knocking at their door”—the old pastor phrased his meaning with oblique delicacy—“well, you can imagine what they’re apt to think, Father.”
“I can well imagine,” said Stephen. His thoughts were divided between Monaghan’s theory of parish visitation and Cardinal
Glennon’s description of Ned Halley as a “conspicuous failure.” In their own way, both might be right. But in another way—a sensitive way that neither Glennon nor Monaghan could conceive—Ned Halley was right, too.
STEPHEN found L’Enclume after a brisk fifteen-minute walk. Following the macadam road, he passed huge derricks with broken booms, old donkey engines, their boilers rusty from exposure, clinging to the rim of abandoned pits that once rang with drill and hammer but were now filled with stagnant pools.
What had happened here? How long ago? Who could tell him the story of these desolate quarries, and the fate of the men who had once worked them? Unconsciously Steve turned his head, hoping to see Hercule’s spidery rig clopping down the road. But behind and ahead the road was bare. Where are all the people? he wondered, gazing about the strangely unpopulated countryside.
He dipped left down the dirt road as Ned Halley had directed, and came to the first landmark, the burned-out forge. Its tall stone chimney was still standing, and the huge anvil that had given the place its name lay overturned amid a heap of debris. Inanimate things are the most desolate of all, thought Stephen. Then another fifty paces, and he stepped from the inanimate desolation of the forge onto the stage of a vast amphitheater teeming with life.
In front of him a steep hill fanned out on three sides; terracing its slopes, somewhat like benches in a stadium, were the tar-paper shacks of L’Enclume. A midmorning sun touching the scene with the first warmth of spring had tempted the inhabitants out of their mean dwellings. Shawled women with clothespins in their mouths were hanging poor garments on sagging lines. Men smoked black clay pipes at broken gateways or climbed makeshift ladders to nail pieces of tin or wood to leaking roofs. Pigs, hens, dogs, and children issued from winter’s pen and raced over the muddy slopes of the hill. Stephen felt as though he were viewing a mammoth anthill from its base.
No one paid the slightest attention to him as he climbed up and down quagmire lanes, making a point-blank appraisal of L’Enclume’s houses and people. A taxgatherer would have turned away hopelessly; revenue from these people was unthinkable. They seemed alien in spirit too; impenetrably hostile in alien, suspicious ways. The men did not touch their hats, the children darted away as Stephen approached. L’Enclume certainly was not the picturesque tableau of song and story—the village padre surrounded by his respectful flock offering the first fruits of their husbandry. No, this was something else again—a reality meaner, more terrifying than Stephen had ever imagined.
The full weight of his exile settled upon his shoulders. Here among unfavored strangers, he must beat out his salvation—and theirs, if possible—on the anvil of ugly reality. How and where should he begin? Trained in the Monaghan school of house-to-house visitation, Stephen yearned to knock at the doors of these people, break down their resistance with acts of service and love. But he was under other orders now; he must not embarrass the inhabitants of L’Enclume by entering their homes. If only he could come upon Hercule Menton, the brown, mischievous man might advise him how best to win the hearts (or at least the friendly smiles) of these suspicious natives.
At a thicket of R.F.D. mailboxes he saw a knot of men puffing at their pipes. “Could you tell me where I can find Hercule Menton?” he asked.
The men exchanged sullen glances, warning each other to silence, then started to drift away. Angered by their sheer incivility, Stephen was about to seize one of them by the shoulder when he heard the ringing of an indecently loud bell. He turned and saw, in the middle of the quagmire road, a curious cart, once white, but now streaked with mud and time. A black-letter legend, VICTOR THENARD, MEATS AND PROVISIONS, was painted on its side. At the tail of the cart stood a man in a bloodstained apron, wielding his cleaver with the butcher’s professional disregard for thumbs, as he hacked at a quarter of ancient beef. Stephen came close to the cart; tripes and loops of foreign-looking sausages hung from iron hooks. The man finished hacking, picked up a bell, and rang it town-crier fashion, bellowing, “Viande de boucherie, bas prix.” At the sound of his bell and voice, the women of L’Enclume came running out of the tar-paper shacks. With black shawls flung over their heads they gathered at the cart tail, pulling at scraps of meat as they gabbled to the butcher and each other. The gabbling of the women and their wheeling motions about the butcher’s cart gave the scene a nightmarish quality, part witch dance, part adoration of some tribal totem.
Shocked, almost frightened, Stephen hastened away from the butcher cart. He knew that he must resist the temptation to overfastidiousness, but this cackling tug of war for scraps of spoiled flesh challenged his ideal of human behavior. As he climbed the hill he realized how heavily the souls of men were freighted by fleshly ballast—imposts of passion and appetite that must be accepted as part of the human luggage. At the top of the hill he gazed backward and saw a scene of Breughelish activity below; the inhabitants of L’Enclume were performing the mixed duties of life—banal, sorrowful, compulsive. “What did I expect of these people?” he asked himself. “Urbane deportment, intellectual discourse, picture-book piety? Absurd.” Sympathy and understanding claimed him. Whatever approach he would make to these strange souls must be made on the basis of mortally limiting facts.
Turning, Stephen saw the steep gorge that Ned Halley had pointed out; on its farther rim stood the blocky edifice of St. Peter’s. Despite the pastor’s warning, he decided to take the short cut through the valley. A narrow road, scarcely more than a trail, led him down the bushy descent into the swampy lowland, past ruined trees half submerged in pools of stagnant water. The pools gradually became a bog filled with a kind of white moss, half lichen, half peat. Stephen stooped, tried to pull up a handful, and was amazed at the stubbornness with which the moss roots clung to damp soil. The tenacity of earth-sprung things! Yet examining the moss, he found it to be a delicate interlacing of tendrils finer than the work of a crochet needle. He held the moss to his nose; its odor was a mixture of death passing into life, the primal smell of nature.
Now the ground rose slightly; the bog gave way to a stand of dark pines—majestic first-growth conifers, huge-boled and heavy-boughed. As Stephen entered the wood, the light grew dimmer, greener, pierced only by an occasional broadsword of sun. Stephen was familiar with the allegories that men of all ages have hewn from forests. It pleased him now to ask, “What forest is this?” Not the dark wood in which Dante encountered the antique guide that led him through Hell and Purgatory. Not the tarn forest of Grendel nor the tangled grove guarding the Jason fleece. Stephen rejected these as too lofty, too remote. The great pines in the hidden gorge between L’Enclume and St. Peter’s held a meaning more immediate and personal, yet plaguingly concealed.
Standing on a carpet of springy needles and brown pine cones, he gazed up through the great branches spreading like massive candelabra above. Whatever the secret of these trees might be, he knew that he would come here often and alone to read his Office, to forget his human isolation, and to remind himself of his spiritual destiny as a priest.
Following the path through the forest, he climbed a steep slope and came out of the gorge at the back door of St. Peter’s. He had traveled a full circle across his parish. He had encountered poverty, decay, desolation, and indifference. He had discovered the anvil of his fate and welcomed the falling sledge of experience that would beat him into tougher, more tempered steel
CHAPTER 2
THE POVERTY at St. Peter’s was grimmer than Stephen had imagined; the people of L’Enclume hadn’t enough money to support themselves, let alone their pastor. No one paid pew rent; the standard contribution at Mass was a penny, and one rainy Sunday in April the basket yielded only ninety-two cents. God himself couldn’t run a parish on that! And on the day that Father Halley pleaded for special generosity in the matter of Peter’s pence—the annual collection for the Supreme Pontiff at Rome—the parishioners responded with $1.85. To this amount the pastor gravely added such odd coins as he had on hand, and asked his curate to send a postal money
order for $2.50 to the archdiocesan treasurer.
Father Fermoyle took private pleasure in writing the money order. He pictured the Cardinal running his finger down the list of pastoral contributions and coming to the item: St. Peter’s, Stonebury, Mass., $2.50. Probably His Eminence would have a cerebral hemorrhage. …
Stephen had to marvel at the pastor’s genius for operating without ready money. Somehow, he managed to survive on the crumbs brought in by his parishioners—an egg from Berthe Crevecoeur, a smoked perch or a heel of habitant bread from Agathe d’Eon. The heavy meal of the day was a bowl of pea soup placed unobtrusively on the pantry shelf by the Mesdames Bouchard and Leblanc. The old man could subsist on this meager diet, but roaring hunger drove Stephen to the grocer in Stonebury, where he laid out his last twenty-five dollars in a hoard of basic eatables: coffee, rice, canned goods, potatoes, and condensed milk. What he would do when these supplies ran out was a matter that Stephen preferred not to think about.
Desperately he canvassed ways and means of jacking up parish revenues. The usual methods of raising funds—a whist party or church bazaar—were out of the question. No one in L’Enclume played whist or had any cash to purchase the frosted cakes, raffle tickets, or secondhand knickknackeries generally on sale at a bazaar. For a moment Stephen considered sending out a humorous SOS to Corny Deegan: “Save Our Souls (with Cash Contribution).” But he remembered that the contractor-Knight was on a mixed jaunt to Dublin and Rome—restoring broken abbeys in the one place and repairing ecclesiastical power lines in the other. Whatever begging Stephen would have to do must be done in humbler ways.
A letter to Bill Monaghan asking for discarded altar linens and vestments brought a bundle by express, together with a twenty-dollar check for Father Halley’s “special intentions.” Stephen had nearly persuaded the pastor to spend the money patching the church roof when a mendicant monk (the very Friar Ambrose that Stephen had seen in the Cardinal’s antechamber) wandered past, sandal-shod. Ned Halley endorsed the check over to Friar Ambrose, “to help the good man,” as he timidly explained to Stephen, “carry on his work in Upper Nigeria.”
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